One rule matters more than all the others on this road, so let's be clear about it: never cross the double-yellow line. Not to straighten a curve, not to pass, not for a second. Almost every serious crash on the Dragon comes down to the same thing — a vehicle drifting across the centerline in a blind corner, into someone coming the other way. On a bad stretch this road has taken around eight lives in a year; most years it's one or two, and it's overwhelmingly that one mistake.
The speed limit is thirty the whole way, and Tennessee and North Carolina both enforce it hard, with radar and unmarked cars. But the limit isn't really the point — the lane is. Stay all the way inside yours. Ride a pace where you could stop for anything: a downed rider, a photographer's parked car, gravel, a deer. There's no prize for the fastest run and no reward at the end except getting to do it again, and the folks who get hurt out here are almost never the slow ones. Keep it in your lane, keep it under control, and the Dragon gives you one of the great drives of your life.
Photo: William Klos from Mason, US · CC BY 2.0
